This application claims the benefit of a Japanese Patent Application No.2000-256338 filed Aug. 25, 2000, in the Japanese Patent Office, the disclosure of which is hereby incorporated by reference.
1. Field of the Invention
The present invention generally relates to document read-out apparatuses and method and storage media, and more particularly to a document read-out apparatus which has a function of reading out a document, a document read-out method, and a computer-readable storage medium which stores a program for causing a computer to read out a document.
2. Description of the Related Art
Conventionally, various document read-out apparatuses have been proposed to carry out a speech synthesis process with respect to a document so as to read out the document. The document which is read out, may be a document which is input to a word processor or the like, a document which is stored in a recording medium such as a floppy disk or, a document corresponding to a text or the like of an electronic mail, for example.
The conventional document read-out apparatus is capable of carrying out a fast-forward operation and a rewind operation. When carrying out the fast-forward operation, the user makes manual operations to temporarily stop reading out the document, make a fast-forward to a specified position of the document, and start reading out the document again from the specified position. On the other hand, when carrying out the rewind operation, the user makes manual operations to temporarily stop reading out the document, make a rewind to a specified position of the document, and start reading out the document again from the specified position.
Hence, when carrying out the fast-forward or rewind operation in the conventional document read-out apparatus, there were problems in that the user must carry out the troublesome operation of manually stopping the document read-out, making the fast-forward or rewind to the specified position, and then resuming the read-out from the specified position.
In addition, in the conventional document read-out apparatus, a so-called skip is made during the fast-forward and rewind operations, and the document is not read out during this skip. For this reason, there was also a problem in that it is impossible to know the contents of the document during the fast-forward and rewind operations due to the skip.